


Blameless and Monstrous

by egh_yo



Category: Death Note, Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alive Matt | Mail Jeevas & Mello | Mihael Keehl, Alive Mello | Mihael Keehl, Angst, Blaming Mello but needing Mello, Car Chases, Character Development, Developing Relationship, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Friendship, Friendship/Love, How did Matt get so messed up, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Matt POV, Matt blames Mello, Matt is bitter, POV First Person, POV Original Character, Prison, Recreational Drug Use, Romantic Friendship, Wammy House, Yaoi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24379327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/egh_yo/pseuds/egh_yo
Summary: I blame Mello for the first time I went to prison, and I’m pretty sure he’s about to land me back there.Matt POV. Very strong references to drug use and some references to violence and death.A bit dark. Mostly focused on Matt, his back story and his dependance on Mello/drugs.
Relationships: Matt | Mail Jeevas & Mello | Mihael Keehl, Matt | Mail Jeevas/Mello | Mihael Keehl, Mello - Relationship
Kudos: 12





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of fun writing this so I hope someone out there likes reading it

‘Matt, come on.’

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘I seriously need you to do this. Jesus, _you_ seriously need you to do this.’

‘I don't know man, I’m really not about that kinda shit. I'm a computers guy, a tech hack, yeah maybe but, like, sell drugs? That’s just straight up crime.’

‘Hacking people and running malware is “straight up crime”? What’s the difference? You’re not exactly a perfect person. Matt. We need the money.’

‘Uhh... Ahh jesus... Look I really dunno Mel... Besides it's effort too, I wouldn't even know how.’

‘Jesus! I’ll do all the hard stuff. Matt. Please. I’m asking you nicely so will you please just fucking do it so we don’t just leave Wammy’s and die in poverty.’

In hindsight, it was a conversation that I probably should have shut down. It’s not even my first memory of just blindly following Mello’s orders.

Mel was convinced that Wammy would only dip his hand into his wallet for number one, which would obviously be Near, so we’d need our own funding to get to Japan. I really wasn’t too bothered about getting to Japan, but Mello was persuasive and I had no other plans. I’d been running some basic ransomware online, while other people in the house were studying or whatever, to get money for cigarettes. It was basic and easy and it didn’t really cause too much harm. Mel wanted me to use my internet anonymity to buy study drugs on the dark web and sell them to other kids at the house. Despite my reservations, I did it.

I mostly sold Ritalin, I wasn’t really used to selling anything else, so when Price had asked for some Valium, I gave him a handful of Xanax and had shrugged and said, ‘Valium, Xanax, they’re kind of just the same thing.’

Price took some Xanax that he thought was Valium and overdosed.When I found out I could’ve sworn I felt the cold leaden heap of his corpse falling directly on top of me.

I sat under the window in our dorm, soaking in my own freezing cold sweat. A painful fear twisted and squeezed at my insides so tightly I felt it crush the air in me. I felt like I was choking.

I blame Mello for this. I told him I didn't want to do it. 

Mello came into the dorm half laughing. ‘Trying to kill off the competition, Matty? Price was, like, _maybe_ twelfth. You can do better. you’d need to be killing off Near really, man. Maybe you could slip something in his coffee.’

Mello never cared about collateral damage. 

I looked up at him horrified. ‘It’s not funny. He’s dead. He’s really dead.’ My voice trailed off into a murmur as I tried to stomach a truth that I had brought to life but wanted so so badly to escape. ‘I’m going to go down for this Mel...’ I stared at the floor not looking at Mello, unable to shake the feeling that we were both monsters but that he was somehow worse.

Mello assured me that, ‘Wammy has a way with things. It’ll all be dealt with internally. Totally off the books.’

I _had_ hoped that Wammy would spare me. The thought of prison made my chest hurt. I had sat in his office feeling too small for the chair I sat awkwardly in. He looked at me with sympathetic but resolute eyes. His voice resonated low and warm and it shook through me.

‘I’m sorry Mail, but you have to be dealt with appropriately and as is seen fair. The entire purpose of my school is to uphold righteousness and I have always spoken with complete clarity on our need to be driven by moral principles. It is something that I have taken great length and effort to instil into each one of my pupils and with great success, until now. I also cannot overlook the fact that this is a school of academic brilliance, and the idea that you would resort to selling study drugs that could rain down controversy over the credibility of our students intellectual achievements, well, dear boy, it breaks my heart.’

I felt sick. Had I not been so focused on refraining from puking my guts up, I’d have burst into tears and begged for Wammy to hug me.

‘Did you act within your own agency?’ he asked me suddenly suspicious.

I shrugged. Nodded. He looked at me with scepticism but chose not to interrogate me.

‘I’m just struggling to understand your own personal motivation.’ He said pointedly. A question, but not one that needed a response. Wammy wasn't stupid. He knew who I followed around- who could persuade me into doing anything. I remained hopelessly silent.

‘Mail,’ Wammy sighed and took a pause, he gathered himself. For a moment I was sure he was readying himself to pull a gun out from under his desk and shoot me dead between the eyes then and there – that it’d be more humane that way.

‘Mail. I’m afraid in this tragedy a boy has lost his life and, well, there are currently two officers awaiting you outside my office and they will be escorting you from here to the police station.’ My heart pounded violently against my ribcage. The fear gripped me and tried to tug me down. 

‘No – No!’ I shot up from my chair. ‘I’m not a murderer. It was an accident! An accident.’ I pleaded.

Wammy sealed my fate in a gentle tone.

‘I know, Mail. I know.’ He rose from his seat.

‘I’m sorry Mail. We respect the integrity of just laws here, they apply to everyone, including you.’ He placed a firm hand on my shoulder and standing behind me, turned me to the door and moved me toward the unavoidable.

‘You’re an incredibly bright young man, Mail. Please do not write yourself off here.’

Mello called out to me as I was marched out the house. He ran up to me and grabbed me with both hands, looking panicked he asked in a low voice, ‘you didn’t say anything about me, did you?’ He looked at me intently.

‘No. you’re all good’ I tried to speak cooly. I didn't want him to see me fall apart.

He sighed, relieved. He let me go. ‘Thanks man. I’d do the same for you y’know.’

I knew he was lying, but it kind of helped.

I pled guilty. Partly because I was and partly because the idea of standing trial and going over and over it all made me feel sick. I was sentenced to 2 years for drug dealing and it was finalised in documentation that I, at 16 years old, was officially a bad person. I was sent to a young offender’s institute to serve out my sentence. Prison had seemed to me like a slow, painful kind of drowning that I would never escape from. My first night there I cried silently for Price. The second night I cried for myself. The third night I lay awake and wondered what Mello was doing.

After about a week, I was moved to a permanent wing. My new home. A dark, messed up Wammy’s with concrete walls that spanned the skyline. No video games, no escape. I was lying in my cell on my first night on the wing, when I felt a sudden urgency in my lungs to breathe. An inability in my throat to do so, like it was sealed shut. The air was stolen from my lungs by a sharp dread that jut through my bones. The grey concrete floor and cold metal bedframe dropped out from under me and I gasped and tried to hold on and tried to choke up some air but my tongue was dry and felt like it was blocking out the oxygen from the room.

‘I can’t breathe.’

The door of my cell hurtled away from me. My heart hammered in my chest. I was certain I was about to die.

Two hands landed on my shoulders.

‘You’re okay. Just breathe.’ A voice reached out to me.

‘M-Mello?’ I panted. I wanted him to be here. I don't know why. He makes everything worse. 

‘Yeah, mellow out. Just breathe.’

‘I think... I’m dying,’ I gasped.

‘No I'm sure. I'm sure. I-I can’t breathe.’

‘It’s just a panic attack.’

I panted some more.

‘A wh-what?’ I asked dizzy and confused.

‘You’re ok, just breathe.’

‘Help me’

I’m sure that’s what Price would have felt when he died. Maybe it was even him trying to pull me down with him. The panic subsided a little and the room began to return to its blank and miserable state. I was sitting against the back wall of the cell and my cell mate was crouched in front of me telling me that I was fine. The guy was about my age but muscular. He looked like he could beat the shit out of me.

‘You good?’

‘Um, yeah.’ I said a bit embarrassed. Still feeling breathless. 

‘Its cool man, I had a few the first time I came here.’

He looked into me with these intense, unnerving eyes. 

‘Oh.’ I said, unsure what else to offer. I just got back into my bunk and pretended to sleep.

I later learned the guy’s name was Jorge and he’d been in and out of prison for stealing since he was 13 because he had to help his mum pay for things ever since his dad left. He’d made prison his permanent home aged 17 on account of the fact he threw his step-dad down the stairs for hitting his mum with a photo frame and the guy ended up breaking his neck and dying. His mum was so in love with the guy that she didn’t go to her own son’s trial because she blamed him for murdering her beloved husband. Jorge was actually a decent guy and for a moment I had wished to myself that Mello was driven to stop Kira because the people in the world like Jorge who had had judgement passed on them since they were kids and were thrown into prisons at 13 or 14 years old, didn’t deserve to be killed by some God wannabe. But Mello’s motives were more internalised than that and almost always either came from a place of pride or selfishness or sometimes – in fact, usually- both.

Wammy came to visit me in my first few weeks and I had whimpered with big cartoonish tears in my eyes and a stupid sniffling look on my face and told him desperately how I missed the house and how he was a father figure that I had let down. He always looked at me softly, it always made me feel ashamed. The first few months in prison were bad. I’ve always been keen on my own personal space and I’ve never been keen on taking a shower in front of 30 other guys. I tried to keep a low profile, mostly staying in my cell. It was all so equally blank anyway. Every now and then someone would hear that I could hack and code and asked me to, ‘totally get involved with them on the outside’ and I would tell them, ‘um…sure, yeah maybe.’ Knowing full well that I never intended to see any one of those people ever again. By winter I had, however, made enough connections to get a reasonably steady supply of weed and various pills to help keep me warm outside on the yard and encourage the days to go by a little faster.

I had a lot of lonely nights and a lot of days filled with heartache, feeling homesick for a place I didn’t really have. The rest of the time I just stared blankly at different bits of concrete and thought about sex.

Mello answered the phone every time I called without fail. This is how I know despite himself, somewhere inside him he felt a little guilt for encouraging me to fuck up my life and then move along without me. He usually just complained about Near and I usually just asked him to transfer money into dealers accounts for me so that I could keep buying drugs and he would just tell me ‘okay sure,’ but that those things would just numb my brain and I explained to him that that was quite literally the entire point.

The single worst moment of being in prison came one night in December. I’d had a nightmare that I was kneeling in my old room at Wammy’s and concrete was tumbling down from all the walls around me, falling hard and thudding to the ground, throwing up clouds of ash and smoke. I felt each loud bang in my chest and Mello was grabbing me by the shoulders and yelling, shouting at me that it was fine and I needed to chill out but his hands were icy and blue with veins and his grip vice-like and unwavering. I had to use all of my strength just to pull away from one of his hands and the muscles in his face pulled and contorted as he smiled wickedly and took my chin between his thumb and forefinger, stroking his thumb slowly over my lips. He let go of my other shoulder and pressed a single rigid finger to his own lips to ensure my silence. He leaned his head closer toward mine, pulling my chin up to meet him.

It was a piece of falling concrete hitting his head and then falling between us that woke me up. I jolted awake and my already pounding heart stopped in fright for a moment as I was startled by a bulky leaden object floating in the centre of the cell. It was rotating slightly, swaying and it appeared to me as though it was taking up the entire cell. I stared at it completely paralysed for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Slowly, the curly hair and facial features became visible and my body moved with such a sudden panic that I shocked myself.

I screamed out for help repeatedly as I desperately tried to hold up the weight of my heavy-build cellmate.

‘No no no no no no.’ I whimpered intermittently, shrieking at the four plain concrete walls for help.

They had call buttons for emergencies in every cell and I remembered this after a long time of yelling to nothing and no one. I struggled to kick the button with my foot as I tried desperately to keep my arms wrapped around Jorge’s body.

By the time the officers came I was physically exhausted.

‘Lets move him out.’ I heard someone say. I watched transfixed as they cut his noose down.

‘No…’ I murmured.

‘Right, we need to move you to a new cell. You need to go back to bed.’

Back to be-?’ I attempted to decipher the comment. 

In a state of semi-consciousness I heard officers talking to each other and maybe me.

I spoke toward the body now on the floor. ‘Jorge is dead. I can’t- I don’t-’

‘Come on you’re keeping everyone up.’

‘I’m sorry mate but we need to deal with your cell mate. Now move.’

One hand and then another, then another, started to suddenly grab and tug at me.

‘Get off me...’

They grabbed at my clothes and arms and scared and confused I swung my arm reflexively at nothing and felt my knuckles make a connection. The noise around me suddenly intensified and people were yelling. I was thrown to the floor and my cheek connected with the icy concrete. My body was pressed against the hard ground by the weight of several officers. I was at the same height as Jorge now and I could see his distorted face beginning to turn blue. His face was swollen and puffy. I stared at him, wide-eyed, unable to turn away, terrified that his eyes might suddenly shoot open. I pushed and kicked to try and force myself free from the crushing weight on top of me. I needed to run away. I wasn't safe. 

‘Don’t look at him.’ An officer with her knee digging into my arm was talking to me. I tried to fight free.

‘Look here, look here, don’t look there.’

Somehow I was now on my back looking at the officer unblinking, still struggling and panting hard.

‘Stop fighting’ another voice commanded me as I continued to flail desperately under the weight on top of me. In this time period, someone had handcuffed me and I was only just starting to notice the metal cutting into my wrists as it contorted my limbs and stretched the muscles in my arms. I noticed a crack in the ceiling above me and thought again about falling concrete and Mello grabbing me.

‘Right,’ An officer spoke at me in a booming voice, startling me back into reality. ‘You’ve assaulted an officer, so we’re having to cuff and restrain you.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, all I knew was I’d just found my cellmate hung up like he was in a butchers shop.

But I was lying next to a dead corpse and I was screaming at these people to stay the fuck away from me. Because I didn't know what was going on and it felt like the officers were pushing me down into a grave.But I wasn’t being heard. I was yelling at the walls again. I just wanted help. Why would no one help me. 

‘Calm down, you need to calm down.’ I struggled to meet this expectation.

‘Stop resisting - Right, I’m going to move you onto your feet and you’re going to follow me.’

I whimpered.

‘You’re going to be calm and behave yourself, agreed?’

Yelling and shouting when nobody is listening is just like punching at a heavy bag of sand - All of your energy gets absorbed and eventually you're left exhausted. I nodded weakly and the officer lifted the weight off me and I was yanked to my feet.

I was taken into another cell and told to take all my clothes off. I was told they were needed as evidence.

‘You can’t be serious.. I just… Jorge was okay…’

‘I know its not ideal. It’s procedure. Matt don’t make it worse for yourself. Take off your clothes or we’ll have to do it for you.’

I stripped down, defeated, reduced to something that barely felt human. And so, I stood naked in front of 3 officers, thinking about dead bodies and falling concrete and I couldn’t shed a tear. Some kind of alien feeling sat within me... I don't know what exactly ... but reality lacked a coherency which I never saw properly return. I was moved to a segregated cell for two weeks for apparently punching an officer in the face. Two weeks go past slowly when you don’t have an appetite and you can’t get any pills or even a blunt.

When I called Mello and told him about my cellmate, he jettisoned a question before I could finish.

‘Was it Kira?’

No, a real suicide.

‘Jesus that’s heavy huh. And you saw it? Woah, I bet it was gross.’

I said nothing and there was a pause before he asked me if I was okay with such a genuine hint of concern that it completely threw me, so much so that I checked it was really him I was talking to.

‘Mello?’

‘Yeah..?’

‘I miss you.’

‘I miss you too,’ he replied weightlessly. ‘Everyone else here sucks.’

I was offered some small gesture of counselling some-time after the incident. But by then I’d found some medicinal help of my own and the guy, shrink, whoever, gave up on me pretty quickly after he watched me stare absent-mindedly at his shirt buttons murmuring mostly to myself. Buzzed off some haze or drunk and spinning off ketamine I half asked him questions like, ‘what do you think Japanese people eat for breakfast?’ Or, ‘If God was real would he want to kill all the murderers.. Would that even make sense?’ Not listening to his replies and instead just half closing my eyes saying ‘hmm…cool, sure.’

I did think that I might have been moved to a new cell so that I didn’t have to be reminded of it all by the way the light fixture that Jorge hanged himself from was crooked and torn slightly from the wall. I could see the innards of the fitting, the blue and green wires like veins and they ran into a small crack in the ceiling that I looked up at most nights, the way that other people look up at the North star. I was in a cell by myself for a while before anyone came to fill Jorge’s bed. The next guy to come was older and a drug dealer, but not like me, a proper one. He sold to me regularly but I don’t think I had a single actual conversation with him. I don’t think I even got his name but he had a navy seal tattoo on his neck for whatever reason. He mostly sold me codeine and ket and I relied on Mello to transfer money to his account for it all.

I tried to keep myself a little buzzed at all times. I was bored. So bored. Maybe it was the pills but the whole place really was mind numbing. I didn’t want to think too much and I really couldn’t do anything. Very little stands out to me as significant during the rest of my days there, but I do vaguely remember one afternoon in my last Summer.

Dazed off some codeine I’d bought earlier that day, I motioned slowly through the wing and passed door after door until my drifting attention was diverted to a commotion on the opposite side of the corridor. It didn’t match the slowness I was feeling but nonetheless I ambled over to it, curious. Red blood was pouring out from all over. It took me a while to deduce there had been a stabbing. A kid, younger than me, lay dying on the floor. He was taking up more and more space in the cell. The red contrasted so extremely with the grey/blue walls that it made me feel uncomfortable. There were paramedics and officers surrounding him, soaking up his blood. Instructing each other, shouting out to everyone around them, talking to the guy. I just stared at him. He murmured, lifting his left arm up and down slightly. Ignoring everyone around him he started singing quietly to himself.

“I’m off on an adventure…”

“…I’m on my way to heaven”

Pausing between each line he sang softly.

“Tell us where you’re going, tell us where you’re headed”.

I didn’t know the song, and I’ll never know any other lyrics except the ones he mumbled calmly as his body emptied itself of blood and he became more and more hollow.

At some point during my time in prison I had come to the uneasy pseudo-realisation that either I was bringing about death, or that death was following me and I wasn’t sure which. By the time I left prison I neither knew nor cared.

Mello came to pick me up the day I was released. He showed up on a motorbike, like some kind of biker gang leader.

‘How the hell am I meant to get on that?’ I asked walking toward him, kicking my feet along the ground.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, not good enough for you?’ He snapped back. ‘Worried you can’t fit all your stuff onto it?’ He motioned sarcastically toward my empty hands.

We hugged. He told me he missed me and that he bet I was fucking glad to be free. I thanked him for coming to get me.

‘No problem but hurry up we have to get flights right fucking now.’

‘Fine, just get me as far from here as possible.’


	2. 2

I blame Mello for the first time I went to prison, and I’m pretty sure he’s about to land me back there.

Honestly I don’t even know where exactly we are- I’d spent the entire flight over glued to the Legends of Zelda that I picked up at the airport and I spent every day after that trying to catch up on years of missed tech, but we’ve only been here for what feels like 5 minutes and I am driving a car I just learned to drive with the body of some guy in the back of my trunk. It turns out that while I’ve been wasting my time in prison trying to convince my mind that I was anywhere but, Mello has been really utilising every single second of his time to ensure he is as crazy and obsessive over this Kira situation as humanly possible.

Mello had asked me to meet him at a hideout he’d set up. I had seen the security guards through my dimly lit windowpane and struggled to connect the 16-year-old Mello I knew with bodyguards and henchmen. The building looked institutionalised; a thick, heavy block of concrete infrastructure hidden away from the world and I looked at it and wondered if Mello realised he had created himself his own little prison. Something inside me had tried to pull me away as I walked toward it, a sick sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach had made my steps feel uneasy.

Mello wasn’t there when I entered and I skulked around ignoring everyone, playing on my DS. It was when I went to look for a free plug socket, that I stumbled upon the dead guy - bound to a chair by rope and duct tape- who is now in my car.

‘I didn’t kill him.’ Mello had assured me. ‘Just kidnapped him. Kira killed him.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’ I told him as I watched two henchmen dressed in black, lift the body into the boot of my car. Mello smirked and laughed a little and I knew I shouldn’t but I laughed a little too.

I am tailing Mello, who instructed me to follow him on his motorbike to a place that we can ditch the body. I am trying to consider each possible outcome for Mello’s less-than-sane plans to stop Kira and none of them are good. Finally deciding that thinking is probably not the best way to deal with the current scenario, I take a hand off the wheel and pull a cigarette out from its position in a half-full box and begin to fumble around for a lighter. I glance back and forth between the road that Mello is gliding down and the passenger seat that I’m sure I left the lighter on. Only half paying attention to the road, the red light creeps up on me faster than I anticipate and I only just manage to stop behind Mello’s bike in time, slightly nudging his back wheel and in response to which he turns around and flips me off.

At the next opportunity he cuts me up and I consider his manoeuvre an invitation for a race and accept. At the next set of lights, I pull up alongside him and put a middle finger up to him and he gestures to me moving his fist up and down in a jerking wrist action.

I have completely forgotten the purpose of this trip and where I am. I am focused only on Mello’s dumb motorbike and the blonde hair that sticks out of the bottom of his helmet. I am focused solely on Mello and trying to beat him. I feel mile after mile of road slip out behind me as I speed by streets of houses and shops. I feel the back of the car slip out as I turn corners sharply and wrestle with the steering wheel. I grit my teeth, grinning as I push my foot closer to the floor and the car pulls in front of Mello’s bike. I see him smile in his mirror and I laugh. I feel a giddiness that I cannot remember feeling for a long time.

Mello hugs the curb at a corner and I run wide and watch him begin to speed away. On the horizon we both see flashing lights creep along the side of a glass shopfront and we slam on the breaks simultaneously. As my neck slams back against the car seat, my heart is jettisoned forwards and into my mouth. There is a shift in my vision as my feeling of freedom is crushed by a lacerating sense of entrapment. Mello outstretches an arm motioning to turn into a small road on the left. We turn in and I nervously think about the body still bound in rope in the back of my car. I am trapped like a hamster in a cage. I am wondering why Mello does these things. Why kira matters to him so much. 

I see the police car crawl past in the rear-view mirror and allow myself to breathe again as the blue lights fade. I don’t stop shaking.

Back at the flat, Mello acknowledges the almost run-in.

‘Jesus, we almost landed you straight back in prison.’ He laughs.

I grit my teeth and swallow hard at the thought.

‘Ha, yeah…fuck that.’

The thought comes back to me that night and I have to take half a Xanax to help me sleep.

I am playing GTA while Mello rambles on about the Kira case some more. I am aware that he is talking to me but I am only half listening. He tells me something about needing to build a bomb. I reply to him half-heartedly.

‘Wow’ I say falsely, ‘you are so level-headed ‘.

‘You need to help me make it’.

I ignore him for a minute and carjack some guy and start revving his Banshee through Chinatown.

‘Matt! Are you listening to me!?’

‘One sec,’ I tell him.

I go to drive to the strip club but hearing Mello’s voice grow in annoyance I sling the controller down. I pick our maxed-out credit card up from the table and use the edge to tidy up my last line of coke. I drag my tongue along the card to clean off the residue, not wanting to waste any and then take the straw I’ve been using to snort with and messily inhale my last line. I dab my finger on the leftover bit of white powder on the table and rub it roughly into my gums. Mello tracks my every movement with his eyes. 

‘Okay,’ I tell him. ‘You have my undivided attention,’ adding a single nod of the head to punctuate my feigned dutiful enthusiasm.

Mello scowls but plays nice enough because he wants something.

‘I need you to help me get chemicals to make a bomb.’ Nothing in this sentence surprises me.

‘And how would I do that?’

‘Just go on the dark web like you do for all your pills. Use your thor browser.’

‘Tor.’ I correct. ‘Tor browser.' We've been here before. 'I dunno man, I wouldn’t know where to start.’ I lie, really not keen to get involved in terrorism.

‘That’s a lie.’ Mello quickly observes. ‘You’re a hack.’

‘That’s offensive,’ I grin, ‘I’m so much more than that.’

‘Matt.’ He pushes.

I groan.

‘Matt.’ His voice lowers with impatience. ‘Just do it.’

I do. I do it because, for whatever reason, I always end up doing what Mello wants. Mello makes a bomb and blows himself up in the process of trying to achieve something.

The next time I see him, his face is grossly disfigured by an angry burn all down one side of his face. He looks monstrous but still beautiful and I can’t help but feeling that somehow, he looks more like himself than he ever has done before. The burn fit his face better than his leather gloves fit his hands.

The problem with being someone's sidekick, which let's face it is what I am, is that you aren't needed all the time. And there are these awkward moments where you're left completely alone. I am a stranger to my own life, I know only Mello's and so, it can get uncomfortable when I'm left face to face with Mail Jeevas. Mello often disappears for long periods of time. In these intervals, I often feel an uneasiness creep up inside me that I can dull only by being immersed in a fake video game reality and getting very high. My dealer once told me that if I was a fan of opiates, I’d be stupid not to try injecting them. I know this isn’t the healthiest thing to do, but bored and lonely and sick of waiting for my new Xbox games to arrive, I think 'fuck it' . The air in the flat feels hot and heavy and my stomach flips when I feel the lighter scratch across my thumb. I hold the flame over a dull, rusted spoon that I found in an otherwise barren draw and watch in anticipation for it to bubble and melt the brown. My hand shaking slightly, I manage to drag the contents up a syringe and I feel a rush of adrenaline as I bring it to my arm and feel the needle press into me. Scratching my skin, the needle enters my flesh.

Okay, here goes.

Within a few short seconds, seconds become…longer…like, they disappear. Colours drip around me as everything turns into a syrupy liquid. Soft waves collapse onto me and drift across my skin. I am in velvet water. Everything is cool…yeah… Thoughts in my head give way and as my eyes begin to half close, the waves play an opaque melody for my infinite nerve endings.

Mello returns out of nowhere and tries to disturb my peace. He yanks at my wrist and starts yelling at me from a small point far away. He is trying to guide me somewhere and I haven’t got the heart to tell him that I am way, way…way… out of his reach.

I am…um...total. Peace? yeah…

It is sometime the next day and I am rubbing my face groggily. Mello is ignoring me. I know this even though I have only just woken up and have not yet tried to speak to him. The day passes like this. The flat is silent. Mello goes out for a long time. I get bored, twiddle my fingers. Take a Valium. Fall asleep playing COD. It is not until about 2am, when Mello is sat on the floor trapped in a little circle of newspapers and I am sat on the sofa unable to sleep, jabbing an already burnt out cigarette end into the ashtray, that he finally breaks the silence.

‘I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you. But you’re useless to me when you’re like that.’ There is a short pause before he adds, ‘and you’re even more useless to me dead.’

I feel uncomfortable. I look toward Mello but turn away quickly when his burning eyes shoot up to meet mine.

‘You’re so difficult at the minute.’ He tells me. ‘I never know what I’m gonna get from you.’

‘You think I’m the difficult one?’ I challenge, sure he can’t be serious.

‘Yeah. I do.’

‘Okay, but you have to see that actually you are the difficult one who’s always putting us in danger?’

‘I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALWAYS DOING EVERYTHING!’ He snaps. He starts listing off his achievements. ‘Who got us this flat, who got you that car? Who paid for you to fly out here in the first place!?’

The idea that I owe Mello gratitude fucks me off. Everything that happened in prison. What I saw... He owes me for that. He fucked my head up. I spit back at him with rage. ‘I came here for you! Are you fucking kidding me?’

‘Oh because you had such big fucking plans for England. What was next on the list, Matt? Lie around and get high? Or maybe get arrested for arms dealing this time?’

‘YOU’RE THE WHOLE FUCKING REASON I GOT ARRESTED.’

‘No. You got arrested because you were lazy and careless.’

‘Fuck off Mello.’

‘I picked you up from prison. I waited to move here for you! FUCK YOU Matt, you fucking ungrateful little bitch.’

He throws something at me which smashes and leaves, slamming the door behind him. I pace the flat angrily for a while. Snort a line of coke for no reason at all. I can’t calm down so I throw a jacket on, take my car keys and go.

I am speeding in an uncontrollable rage. A police car pulls out from a dully lit street corner and flicks on it’s sirens. I choose to ignore it. The one siren turns into three or four. I speed up. 95mph. My heart is beating louder than the engine is revving, I hold my foot so fucking flat to the floor that it starts to cramp up. One wrong turn. One wrong turn about a minute back and I am on roads I don’t recognise. I can see the lights in the rear-view mirror, sirens whirring. Mello is so deep-seated in my brain. I look back to the road- Shit. A little kid. In the middle of the road. In the middle of the fucking night? I slam on the breaks and swerve.

BANG.

Glass shatters on impact, metal crumples and mangles itself and there is a lamppost in the middle of my car. My organs hit into my bones as I am thrown forward like I’ve dived off a roof and they hit again as I am jolted back like the ground threw me back up. I am bleeding and I can’t tell if I have a pulse. Dazed, I forget what I am doing. Swirling blue and red lights remind me that I want to get out of the car. I push on the door and use it to drag myself out.

I am on the floor. Someone is holding my head. I don’t want to die like this. I see the little bastard kid that caused all of this standing in front of me. His bright blue eyes are staring directly into my own and his blonde hair is blown back by the wind. The kid just keeps fucking staring at me and I want to growl at him. The music from my car is still blaring but its whirring and wet and muffled either because we are underwater or there is blood in my ears.

There are ambulance staff and police officers around me now and I can’t tell which is which. Someone way beyond the two metres around me that I am familiar with says, ‘poor kid, so young.’

‘I reckon he was going over 100.’

‘He could’ve killed someone.’

'I bet he's a drug dealer.’

‘You need to stay awake.’

Huh?

‘Stay awake, sweetheart.’

People are touching all over my body. I’m not sure what’s going on.

I hear someone say, ‘there’s blood in the trunk of his vehicle.’ I know this is bad.

‘Who is this kid?’

There is a loud screeching as a blacked-out van pulls up right beside me. Either I am seeing double or other identical cars join it and circle around me and the police like sharks.

‘You can’t come through here sir, you need to turn around.’ One of the officers say.

I can hear the sliding of the van doors and see slightly blurred figures holding guns move toward me in mass.

‘GET BACK!’ One of them yells.

I attempt to sit up but can barely even lean on an elbow. I look around vacantly. Suddenly nobody is around me. The officers have disappeared. I can hear shouts and a few loud pops make my ears start to ring. I see an armed man in black who I think I recognise as one of the guys that put the body in my car at Mello’s base, hit an officer with the butt of his gun. My mind is reeling and my head throbs. My body goes floppy as several of Mello’s henchmen load me into a van.

I spend several days in a comatose state. When I awake I have a broken arm and a fractured rib-cage. Parts of my arms and one of my cheeks are marked from where fragments of glass have sliced open the skin, making deep incisions now loosely sewn back together and filled with jellied blood. A cut on my neck had leaked the most amount of my blood. Mello doesn’t let me go to the hospital but arranges for someone to visit regularly to change my stitches and check I’m not dead. I notice he hovers around the flat slightly more often in this time period and makes an attempt to buy food regularly.

Mello tries a radically different approach the next time he attempts to discuss my drug use and my place in his plan to stop Kira. He places two hands on my shoulders and looks directly into my eyes. 

‘Please Matt, I need you. I can’t do any of this without you.’

It makes me feel... Something, I'm not sure. Like being 15 with him again. 

Sometimes I have these nightmares layered within other nightmares, drug related I'll admit. I think I’ve snatched myself out of the immobilising jaws of horror and near death, certain I am back in my own flat, when reality twists and distorts and something new rears its ugly head. I awake again, or so I think, until a familiar face contorts and reaches for a knife in the kitchen and chases me out from my own bed. Nightmare within nightmare, I am completely boxed in and real life is too many terrifying levels away from me to grasp at.

I wake with a jolt from a fourth nightmare like I’m pulling my head from under water. I am shaking. I am on the sofa and a figure that looks like Mello is sitting at the small wooden table that we picked up from the side of a road. My movement has caught his attention and he looks up at me. Alarmed, I pull away out of distrust.

‘Is this real?’ I can hear the panic in my own voice.

Mello looks at me convincingly perplexed. ‘Um…yeah? What the hell do you mean?’

‘So, I’m awake. Right? I’m awake?’ I can feel beads of sweat moving down my back and they’re cold and I shiver. I leap to my feet to check I’m not paralysed, looking around for anything unusual. Mello moves toward me. I am still wary of him.

‘Jesus.’ He mutters to himself.

‘I’ve been stuck in so many dreams, Mel. I dunno, I can’t tell if this is still one.’

‘No,’ he replies rubbing a hand on my back. ‘You’re definitely awake.’

I am still unsteady.

‘This is real, I am real, you are real.’ He confirms. ‘C’mon, you need your bed.’

He assures me that I am okay and guides me to the bedroom. He encourages me to lie down in bed and I oblige. Noticing I am shaking he pulls the duvet over me tightly and tucks in the edges.

‘Jesus, you seriously need to do less drugs.’

I burst into tears and sob randomly. Mello looks at me with total confusion and asks me why I’m crying and I tell him it’s because Price is dead and prison concrete looks blue and I think I do care that death follows me and he looks at me gently and then saying nothing, strokes my hair. When he begins to turn to leave I clamp my fingers around his arm, suddenly sure that my life depends on him staying in the room. I clutch at him desperately and he looks down at his arm to identify the source of resistance. He humours me and sits back down on the edge of the bed for a little while.

It is sometime late the next day and Mello has been staring at me, saying nothing, for what feels like a significant amount of time. He does this for a while longer and I become more and more uneasy until finally he speaks. He tells me that he should have never told me to sell drugs and I reply that he probably shouldn’t have.

‘But you did it though.’

‘huh?’

‘You did it. Just because I said so.’

I concentrate with complete focus on each word Mello is saying, staring at a cigarette butt in the ashtray.

‘And you helped me build a bomb and you ran every red light with a body in the boot of your car just because I told you to.’

I try to respond. ‘Well I did that because it was fun-

‘No you didn’t.’ He refuses. ‘You did it because I told you to.’

The comment disarms me and it shows on my face more than I’d like it to.

I arch an eyebrow and turn to look out the window. ‘What are you trying to do here, Mel? You control me, is that what you're getting at?’

‘I’m just wondering what else you’d do just because I tell you to.’

His tone is enough to make me turn my head to face him. Unsure what to do, I reach for a codeine on the table and he pulls my arm away from it and I surprise myself by my lack of protest. He hasn’t let go of my arm and I am completely paralysed by his close proximity and the look in his eyes.

‘What are you talking abou-‘

Mello kisses me invasively on the lips. I feel a warm heat in the bottom of my stomach. His ethereal blue eyes are so close to my own when he opens them that I cannot pay attention to anything else as I am drawn into him.

He pulls away, smirks and half asks a question. ‘If I told you to jump off a bridge would you do that too?’

I close my eyes and exhale a slightly amused laugh. ‘Maybe.’ 

He kisses me again. ‘Well never do that. Ok? Just do as you’re fucking told.’

I know he was joking, but he knows that I would. In any case, I decide that it doesn’t matter if I blame Mello for the direction my life has taken, because he sets me free as much as he entraps me. He is so often the only difference between life in and outside of a prison cell.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
